


General Issue

by theleaveswant



Category: The Losers (2010)
Genre: Army, Betrayal, Character Study, F/M, M/M, Military, One of My Favorites, Unhealthy Relationships
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-10-22
Updated: 2010-10-22
Packaged: 2017-10-12 19:59:39
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,115
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/128495
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theleaveswant/pseuds/theleaveswant
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A speculation on the dysfunctional marriage of Roque, Clay, money, and the U.S. Army.</p>
            </blockquote>





	General Issue

**Author's Note:**

  * For [mumblemutter](https://archiveofourown.org/users/mumblemutter/gifts).



> I wrote this to accompany a music mix for A. of mumblemutter, commissioned in the help_pakistan auction, Summer 2010.

If the army wanted you to have a wife, they'd have issued you one.

That was the joke they ribbed Porteous with when he told them his girl had finally said yes. It was an old joke, had been old when Roque's father's unit ribbed him with it, but there was something to it. For all the army feared its atoms bonding too strongly with one another, it feared their bonding with anything outside its structure too, and for much the same reason. Divided attention meant divided loyalty, meant disobedience. Disobedience meant death, not of the soldiers but of the system. Roque's father learned that the hard way, Roque guessed, though he never got the whole story.

He was a quiet man, at least after he came back from Vietnam. That's what his mother said; Roque himself was too young to remember much about him. A quiet man who died quietly, with neither bang nor whimper but the comforting rumble of an engine inside a sealed garage, and who quietly took his pension with him.

Roque didn't join the army because he believed in it, although he did. Born into a country at war both with alien forces on the far side of his classroom's brightly-colored globe and within its own lumpy borders, Roque never knew he had the option of _not_ believing in the army. He joined up because he needed money and because it would get him out of his sad mother's sad kitchen.

Roque never married for three reasons: he never met a girl he liked enough. He already had a mother to support and he had no desire to pass her sadness on to another poor widow. And the army never issued him one. Instead, they issued him Clay.

Perhaps, technically, given their uneven rank, it might be fairer to say that the army had issued him to Clay. They were rather one-sided, the commands to honor and obey—not to love, never to love.

He didn't love Clay. Not at first, certainly. Their first tour of duty, Roque wasn't sure he even liked him, but somewhere along the way he started to grow on him, like a fungus in the warm dark small places on those sweaty weeks of unwashed adventure. Swamp algae, jungle moss, desert lichen, Clay grew on him, a green and creeping parasite.

He knew something was wrong as soon as he found himself spending more time with Clay than was absolutely required, but by then the infection was too deep. He didn't know what to do with himself when he wasn't taking care of Clay. That was how it started, of course: holding the pieces together when Clay fell apart, as he did on a more or less regular basis. Roque never expected any kind of concern or affection in return any more than he expected the hand down his khakis, the kiss of teeth, breath on his neck and the blood-hot spatter of cum on his thigh. Their fucking was good, seismic, but it was the apéritif morsel tastes of tenderness, of reciprocity, that snared him like a first free hit of heroin.

That went on for years: they'd go weeks at a stretch without a word or look or touch out of line with the conduct expected of officers of the U.S. Army, and Roque would wonder whether there'd ever been anything other or if it was all in his imagination. Then Clay would fall in love and forget ever having even a platonic interest in Roque or the rest of his unit, until the new object of his affection (most often an emotionally unavailable woman or a boy half his age) died or tried to kill him or found some rarer, more creative way of betraying him, and it would be up to Roque to nurse him back to health. Occasionally, if he went an especially long time between affairs, Clay would get bored and corner him for a hushed and frantic fumble in the dark, but he always slunk back to his own berth before sun-up, when he acted again as if none of it had ever happened.

It was sick. Roque knew that. He wasn't stupid. It was a bad situation and he had to get out of it, which was why he was planning to request a transfer as soon as they finished up in Bolivia. Then Max happened.

Shattered by the biggest betrayal of his biggest love, rejected by the Army he'd believed in more than Roque ever had, Clay had clung harder to Roque than ever before. Roque let him, for a while, gave him whatever he thought he needed because he didn't know what else to do (Clay was still the C.O.; even if Roque could find a way to get them back into the U.S., he'd need Clay on board for it to work). And maybe he whispered something, one of those early dark nights, kneeling in front of Clay with a towel full of ice for his bloody knuckles. Some comforting inanity: we can find him, this Max. We can make him pay. Maybe it worked a little too well.

He nurtured Clay's new obsession for the first few months out of guilt, though he was never sure Clay had been sober enough that night to hold him responsible for planting it, before trying to talk him out of it, and then just as soon as he thought he might finally be getting through, Aisha. Precisely the kind of mousetrap Clay could not keep his small appendages out of. Roque could see, even if Clay couldn't, that there was no way for _that_ to end well, but he went along with it for a while because she was offering a way back Stateside. He figured, if her plan worked, Max would die, and he could walk away from Clay with a clear conscience. If it didn't, or if she turned around and succeeded where so many others had failed, well, that would take care of the problem too.

Then came the disaster in Miami, and that was a mixed blessing of another sort. Clay took Aisha's side over his, chose revenge over freedom and literally hit him in the face with it. But there was the courier drive, four hundred million dollars so shiny and light you could stick it in your pocket and go anywhere. The one solution he'd never thought of: the problem that had gotten him into this situation in the first place.

With enough money, you could find ways not to think about what you did. For enough money, no one would question why you really did it.


End file.
